Last month Twitter replaced its Favorite icon, the star, with a heart. The move has been three years in the making as the social media company was looking for a way to help increase engagement for users.

Part of the problem is some people were using the favorite as that would imply it was something great. Using a heart to imply a like is a lower standard that would be more inclusive. I’ll heart a lot of things that I wouldn’t call a ‘favorite’.

It is a smart move by Twitter that is already paying dividends.

Kevin Weil, Twitter’s senior VP of product, said in the first week after the change, like activity was up 9% for new users and 6% for old users.

Several accounts lost chunks of followers in November. Dudley Freedom had a drop of nearly 6,000 but still remains fourth. Singer Twanee saw her follower count go from 6,600 to 3,900 and as a consequence dropped 12 spots from 31st to 43rd.

Elbow Beach Cycles had 1,600 followers disappear from their account and fell from 15th to 18th in the list.

There were several other accounts which lost more than 100 followers.

Bermuda’s most social cat, Walt_E_Bobs, was the biggest mover in the top 50 by going from 43rd to 39th with an additional 800 followers in November.

Don Burgess is the former deputy editor of the Bermuda Sun newspaper who has earned certifications in social media and inbound marketing through Hootsuite, HubSpot and Lern Univeristy. If you have a Twitter following of more than 3,162 and were not on this list, please e-mail Don Burgess at dburgesspb@gmail.com.

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Comments (1)

i wont mention who, but a certain person on this list uses a company that creates fake users on twitter to make it seem that they have more followers. most of the followers on his account are fake ‘bots”